Costa Del Sol (place)

Costa Del Sol (Coast of the Sun) is a town in the game Final Fantasy VII. True to its name, Costa Del Sol mostly exists as a resort town, as well as a port with substantial military traffic.

Within the game, realtively little time is required to be spent at Costa Del Sol, and few major plot points take place there. The city has only three or four screens to explore, mostly full of anonymous tourists, enjoying the sun. The town is perhaps msotly noticable for the fact that Squaresoft would take so much time designing a look and feel to a town that is not centrally important to the game. The architecture of the town looks quite like what you imagine the architecture in a Mexican seaside resort village should look like, with stucco looking houses. Despite the rather grim world situation in the game, the tourists in the city, especially in the tavern and on the beachside, look to be enjoying themselves quite throughly. And this being a Final Fantasy game, Nobuo Uematsu has composed a song that quite perfectly captures the feeling of a seaside resort.

The happy, laid back feeling of Costa Del Sol is even more accentuated by the fact that when you first arrive in the town, you have just finished crossing the sea, a sea voyage that is punctuated by your first meeting and battle with a mysterious demiurge figure. The fact that the game designers should follow this up with a sojurn in a happy seaside resort is one more proof of their genius.